Life after James

On February 12 1993, a toddler was abducted from a Merseyside shopping mall by two 10-year-old boys. Two days later, James Bulger's mutilated body was found on a railway line. Blake Morrison, who attended the killers' trial and wrote the definitive book on the subject, looks back at how it changed the way this country thinks about its children and wonders if any lessons have been learned.

The BBC called it a "landmark case", and so it was. It came to symbolise a moral panic about children - the threat of other people's, the defencelessness of our own. But for the first few hours after James Bulger went missing, it was assumed that the abductor was an adult. And had the child, following the usual pattern, been killed by someone he knew - a father, stepfather, uncle, neighbour or family friend - the story would have rated only a passing mention.

What put it on the front page was an image. A shopping-centre surveillance camera had caught two shadowy figures leading away a smaller figure, his hand placed trustingly in theirs. Two days later a body was found on a railway line. The two-year-old child had been attacked with bricks and an iron bar, then laid across the tracks to make it look like an accident. That was Sunday, February 14, Valentine's Day. The surveillance images convinced the police that they were looking for two teenagers. Until Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were taken in for questioning on the Thursday morning, no one imagined that the killers would be as young as 10.

The image of abduction, the horrific death, the grieving parents, the raging crowd outside Sefton magistrates' court, the tender age of the accused - these guaranteed massive news coverage. In some countries, the media are prevented from reporting cases involving child offenders. Even in Britain, reporting restrictions prevented the naming of the two boys until the end of their trial. But this didn't stop the tabloids printing horror stories about them and their families, including wild tales of tortured animals. Why not? This was a landmark case.

Most of us were haunted by that image from the shopping centre, with its allegory of innocence betrayed. Sales of toddler reins rose sharply, and in a survey of parents by the children's organisation, Kidscape, 97% of respondents put abduction as their biggest worry, ahead of traffic accidents, glue-sniffing and Aids. The message of Bulger was that we were living in a violent new world, where you couldn't trust your children with anyone, not even other children. As Larkin might have put it, parental anxiety began in 1993, between the Children's Act and Eminem's first CD.

Single mothers, absent fathers, school indiscipline, the decline of churchgoing, the 60s, the pill - all were blamed for the emergence of a new generation of child-hoodlums. News reports completed the picture. I still have cuttings collected from that time. Ten-year-old boy abducts 10-month-old baby. Boys aged 10 and 11 charged with rape. Boy of 13 accused of murdering 85-year-old woman. Boy, eight, attempts armed robbery. Boy, 13, denies rape in sandpit. Boys aged 10 and 11 drop five-year-old 14 storeys to death after he refuses them sweets. Boy burglar, six, batters baby to death.

But most of these cases dropped from view or never came to court. And UK statistics don't suggest that violent crimes by juveniles, especially schedule one offences such as rape or murder, were any worse in the 1990s than they had been previously. Recorded killings by children in Britain go back as far as 1748. The last notorious child-killer before Thompson and Venables was Mary Bell, in 1968. And though a dozen other cases of homicide by children were recorded over the next quarter-century, the pattern suggests that it is a crime that happens comparatively rarely - and not that we have bred a new generation of child-monsters.

In the early 90s, though, the only show in town was Kiddy Horror. Cartoons depicted timid adults kowtowing to giant, tantrumy babies. Films and novels declared the age of Golden Treasury innocence dead; children were little devils, dissing their elders and betters. In this climate of post-Thatcherite panic, John Major was under pressure to stamp his authority, by getting tough on juvenile crime. Hence his infamous soundbite on the Bulger case, one of the dimmest political slogans ever dreamed up: "We must condemn a little more, and understand a little less." Understanding nothing, Major looked to the Bulger trial to discourage shoplifters, glue-sniffers, joyriders and other young offenders. The consensus was that kids needed stamping on. They had grown too big - and dangerous - for their own boots.

The Bulger case was iconic. But in hindsight, its lesson is almost the opposite of what it was taken to be at the time - not that children had grown big and dangerous, but that adult society had lost sight of their smallness and vulnerability. The 38 witnesses who claimed to see two boys kicking and beating a smaller boy but who didn't intervene; the failure of teachers and others to halt Robert Thompson's extraordinary level of truanting or notice Jon Venables' sense of neglect; the barbarism of a legal system which demanded that 10-year-olds be tried as adults in a public courtroom: all these point to a failure to protect children, or act in their interests. Amid the hysteria in 1993, Thompson and Venables lost the right to be seen as children, or even as human. The kids who had killed the kid had to be killed, or at any rate locked up for life. The word used about them stopped all arguments. They were evil.

Naively, I went to the trial hoping to answer a simple question: why would two children kill another child? But the law isn't there to tell us why. The CPS needed its conviction. The defence, which called no witnesses, had no instructions from its child-clients but to plead "Not guilty" and hope for the best. The teachers and psychiatrists, who had informed and revealing insights into the boys, weren't allowed to express them: that would be inadmissible evidence; all they could address was the matter of the boys' intellectual maturity - would they have understood what they were doing on February 12 1993?

It was an adult courtroom, and an adult trial, despite the hours being shortened to school hours and the dock being raised by three inches so that the boys could see over the rail. The lawyers I spoke to felt uncomfortable about this, but the law gave them no room to manoeuvre. Many trials have turning-points. The turning-point in this one came on the first day, with the jury still out of the room, when the defence argued that the publicity surrounding the case had been so prejudicial that the boys couldn't receive a fair trial. It was true. I had come up the night before - Halloween - expecting monsters dripping blood, Hindleys and Sutcliffes in all but stature; the jurors would have had a similar impression. The defence had assembled 247 press cuttings, including comparisons between the boys and Saddam Hussein, and a pixelated photo from the Sun of them sucking lollipops on the courtroom steps, "without a care in the world". The submission was persuasive, but it failed. The trial went ahead, as it had to. The outcome was never in doubt. We were caught inside a contradictory logic: that two boys without the maturity to instruct their lawyers were mature enough knowingly to commit murder; that two academically under-achieving primary school kids understood the irrevocability of death. Sitting in the panelled courtroom was like being trapped in a maze.

The boys were present throughout, one tearful, the other fidgeting, but might as well have been elsewhere. The lawyers weren't specialist child-lawyers. The journalists were mostly hardened court reporters, who filed their copy then repaired to be toughly humorous at the hotel bar. Sample joke. Jon Venables had been due to take the school gerbil home for half term on the Friday of the murder. Because he truanted that day, the gerbil remained at school. Reporter: "Lucky escape for the gerbil."

As that suggests, most reporters regarded the boys as a pair of psychopaths, and despite the counter-evidence of the psychiatrists, made much of Robert Thompson's "mad, staring eyes". The headline-writers back in London added to the frenzy and demonisation. The politicians, too. Sympathy for Ralph and Denise Bulger seemed to demand it. Yet for most of the trial, the public gallery remained half-empty, and those who sat there weren't ghouls or voyeurs but law students and foreign journalists. The foreign journalists - the French, in particular - were incredulous that the trial was taking place. We Brits explained our laws: when children commit rape or murder, they are tried in public, not in juvenile courts. Barbaric, they said. But, we asked, didn't the French once put animals on trial? Yes, but that was in the middle ages.

Half the trial consisted of police interview tapes, which were played aloud in court. Out of respect for the Bulger family, who had suffered enough, one tape was omitted, in which the police explored the possibility that the boys had sexually abused James before killing him. His trousers had been removed, and batteries were found next to his body, but the report by the pathologist, Alan Williams (now under siege because of his part in the wrongful Sally Clark conviction), was inconclusive. On the abuse question, the jury is still out. That James had been killed by the two boys was indisputable, though at least one juror now regrets the murder verdict.

Even without sexual abuse, there was no lack of motive for the killing. The tabloid verdict was that Thompson and Venables were aliens from the Planet Evil, or (no less Gothic) video-junkies mimicking Chucky Doll in Child's Play 3. The truth is more humdrum. Their family backgrounds exhibited classic "risk factors" - dysfunction, poverty, alcoholism, marital breakdown, neglect and bullying. Both boys had been held down a year at school, a humiliation which made them team up. Both resented their siblings, and may have punished James for it. Most important, having bunked off school and walked the toddler the two miles back to their school and homes in Walton, they were terrified of getting into trouble with their mothers - and scrambled up on the railway line, where they killed him, to avoid it. The police saw evidence of sophistication and premeditation in the crime. But why, then, did they take the victim to their own neighbourhood, where people knew them? I see damaged children, not cunning adults. They were 10.

Now they are 20, and out of prison, the likelihood of us ever knowing what made them kill is remote. Even if they knew, they would not be able to tell: the long tabloid witch-hunt, and subsequent embargo on all reporting of their new identities and whereabouts, have seen to that. Many commentators criticised their early release and the "leniency" of an eight-year-sentence. But reports of sentences passed at the same time as theirs make instructive reading. "Man who inflicted 23 fractures on a baby sent on anger-management course", for instance. Or "Father aged 44 jailed for seven years for killing his 15-month-old son". Is a middle-aged man who kills his own baby less culpable than a boy of 10 who kills someone else's baby? It seems we think so.

There are more mechanisms for protecting children in 2003 than there were 10 years ago (too many for critics like Frank Furedi, who thinks we are infantilising our offspring). Attitudes have changed as well; the stories of kids too intimidating for adults to tackle have subsided. But the stranger-danger obsession remains. And though paedophiles may be fairer game for vilification than 10-year-old children, the reluctance to understand them (a matter of intellectual inquiry, not empathy or forgiveness) suggests that we're as bigoted and incurious a culture as we ever were.

My last memory of the Bulger trial is of sitting in a pub in Bootle the following week and hearing a newscaster report the death of Anthony Burgess. Months before, Burgess had performed a volte face and mea culpa, by suggesting that the "cult of violence" among the young might be attributable to the influence of films, television and books, his own included. Yet in A Clockwork Orange, the hero, Alex, argues the opposite - that young people, young men, anyway, are like wind-up toys "made out of tin and with a spring inside ... and off it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing." It's the old imponderable: nurture or nature? Outside influence or inner compulsion? But evil isn't mentioned. Evil is no answer. That's one of the lessons of the Bulger case, 10 years on. Time to grow up. Evil won't do.

· Blake Morrison's account of the Bulger case, As If, is published by Granta Books at £7.99.